


OVERCOMPENSATION

by Roturier



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: F/F, Gen, Gossip is a nasty habit, Hurr-hurr, Just a lovely trip to Savile Row for a chat and a fitting, Other, it's all winks and innuendo, nothing overt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-04-20 00:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4766693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roturier/pseuds/Roturier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just exactly what IS Charles Grey's issue with the Phantomhive Butler anyway!? Some mature themes, rough language, and nasty, nasty gossip. But no... really it's just a lovely visit to Saville Row. Utterly harmless.</p>
            </blockquote>





	OVERCOMPENSATION

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Set immediately after manga issue #37, so beware of spoilers if you've yet to read #37 and what follows. Lots of footnotes at the end of this one— mostly historical titbits to help explain one or two of the more obscure remarks the characters make.

 

OVERCOMPENSATION

 

"Just set the usual stool in the centre of the room, Lord Grey and I'll be with you in a trice," Nina Hopkins mumbled and smirked around her mouthful of pins. _Talented mouth,_ Grey mused, watching her scuttle and bounce here and there. Hopkins continued: "I'll just fetch my records and then we'll take a fresh set of measurements to make certain my patterns are up-to-date!" Both ‘Charleses’ watched the energetic, peculiar woman scuttle off talking to herself.

"Not a problem Nina, take your time," drawled the daintier half of 'Double Charles,' watching the female tailor rushing about the front and back rooms of her shop, collecting up the pins, tailor's chalk, pencil, notes and measuring tape-all the accoutrements needed for a proper general fitting. Neither half of the special Queen's envoy batted an eyelash when the designer/tailor pulled shut the dividing curtain on the communicating door and dramatically ripped her specially designed skirt from about her hips to reveal the scandalous, leg-revealing 'clothing' beneath, now that she was out of the public eye. “Aah! That’s better. Right then:up you get, girlie.” Grey was quite used to the woman's outré antics, even her little pinches and excessive touching, and took it all in stride. Phipps too, knew her well enough not to comment on her garb, not wanting another 'Mrs. Bloomer' lecture^.

However strange, Hopkins was a particular friend of Earl Grey’s who wouldn't dream of patronising any other Saville Row tailor so long as Miss Nina was available. Grey handed over her sword baldric

"I... understand you were recently called over to the Phantomhive's... some emergency custom work for him and his little fiancee'." Grey drawled casually. The two exchanged meaning glances as the other half of the Queen's butlers looked on, radiating disapproval from his station at the connecting doorway. "Then I suppose you ran into old 'Stick-up-the-arse'?"Grey said smirking.

"But of course. Can one visit the Phantomhive without running into the Phantomhive butler?"

"Hasn't changed one whit, I suppose."

"Alas no," Miss Nina sneered, "Still Mister Stuffed Shirt, Mandrake of the Manor," but then she quickly brightened, "but young Phantomhive remains as delightfully asexual as ever... oh, those long, smooth, curvaceous legs of his," Miss Nina unshipped a sigh, grinning widely (and in Phipps' opinion, looking more than a little like a daft Bedlamite.) _I'll never understand what Grey sees in her_... Phipps brooded.

"Bumptious, broody bastard... " Grey spat with a grimace, "thinks he's bleeding Heathcliff, dunnee?"

If there was one thing Grey despised it was someone who thought he was better than the Queen's butlers— especially the Grey half, _and when I think of that jumped-up commoner..._ well, suffice it to say Nina shared Grey's opinion of the slick, urbane and slightly sinister butler. "Mark my words, Nina, one day, one day _quite soon,_ he'll get his," Icy grey eyes sought out a hazel pair equally sharp, equally full of mischief and forbidden secrets. "I'll be making certain of it personally," Grey finished in a soft murmur as Nina stretched her measuring tape up, up, up to confirm the length of an inside leg seam.

"Still 'dressing to the right'?+" Nina asked,glancing up, a secretive smirk on her lips, knowing full well the only thing Grey 'dressed to the right' in her trousers was a stiletto and a 'sap'# for 'insurance purposes' in close, hand-to-hand fighting. Over by the doorway back to the showroom, Phipps, having been in on Grey's cross-dressing secret since their shared childhoods and schooldays, clicked his tongue at the two women and tightened his arms across his chest, looking the other way. He wished the woman he loved would quit this damned foolishness and forget about her families' obsession with holding onto titles, and resume her true gender's proper place in society so he could openly declare his feelings and ask for her hand—after all, he had a title too, one even greater than the one Grey held onto with her and her family's sneaky subterfuge. But Grey wasn't having it: her only ambition in life was to prove no man was better than she was at anything—which, he suspected, was the true source of her virulent antipathy toward the suave, capable and handsome Phantomhive butler. 

And tall. _Very_ tall. Tall was one of those irrational obsessions Grey could never forgive a person for—as if it were that person's choice to be tall! She even hated Phipps a little for it and was apt to boot him hard in the shins if he forgot himself and inadvertently 'loomed' over her as she called it. But Sebastian, Sebastian was tall, handsome _and_ talented— not to mention not intimidated in the least by Grey and her over-the-top Napoleonic posturings— an utterly unforgivable combination of faults in her book. He made everything he did look so effortless with his leonine grace and near-permanent devilishly crooked smile. It was a 'perfect storm' of reasons to utterly despise him as far as Grey was concerned. She not-so-secretly spat on his shadow every chance she got and called down evil on the day he was born. Which was the real reason Grey had so thoroughly and vehemently denounced the Guard Dog and his butler's choices in the recent kidnapping case which the queen had code named 'Pied Piper,' the one involving the nobleman, the circus and all those kidnapped children. In Phipps' opinion, her denunciations had only made Grey herself look petty and somewhat irrational before the Queen (God save her!) a fact not entirely lost on Grey herself. It was actually the source of her latest private vendetta against the house of Phantomhive whom she blamed entirely for making her look bad in front of Her Majesty.

Phipps, in a very dark moment, wondered briefly whether Grey and her family had had anything at all to do with what happened to young Ciel's family all those years ago. But he shook it off (because he simply had to! It wasn't a thought worthy of entertaining, surely?) Even Grey would not stoop so low! Would she? No, impossible. Impossible! What was he thinking? Murdering people? Not his Charlie-girl!

Though if there ever were anyone she hated enough to... No. Phipps refused to even think it.

At any rate, for once he'd put his foot down and refused to get involved in Grey's latest insanity beyond accompanying her to deliver the letter to the estate. Beyond that, he washed his hands of the entire affair. "Observe anything useful?" Grey muttered to Hopkins, meaning had she seen anything gossip-worthy during her visit to the Phantomhive's. "Oh, just the usual. Obnoxiously perfect and arrogant as ever," Nina supplied. "The servants had just blown the kitchens sky high, _again,_ demolished _a whole wing_ this time—everything and everyone was coated in soot save one—guess who. Other than that it was business as usual."

"That _is_ business as usual for Phantomhive," Grey quipped with a wild laugh and satisfied smirk. "Make certain you add those secret pockets to the basic design of this one, Nina" Grey reminded, fingering a couple of glass ampules in her pocket. "I'm going to need of every single one of them, especially the little ones behind the lapel on this mission!" Grey called as she leapt from the stool, grabbed Phipps by the back of his sleeve and dragged him out the shop.

"Come on, come _on_! Let's go find some pub grub and stuff ourselves silly," she said cheerily, suddenly skipping forward on the pavement and unsheathing her sword, swinging it about shockingly and rather injudiciously. "I want to celebrate, Phipps!" She shouted. "My machinations mature. I can taste that bastard Michaelis's defeat it's so close and it's giving me an appetite! I could murder a butty right now, hahaha! 'I behold that devil of a butler already fallen from heaven like lightning!'"** Grey laughed aloud, turning pirouettes on the pavement in eager anticipation of whatever it was she was up to— _dear God,_ Phipps thought, he **_really_ ** didn't want to know.

Phipps got her to sheathe her weapon before she winged somebody with it. "You are far too free with waving that thing about at completely inappropriate moments, Grey. You can't keep presuming on your position to save you in such situations!

"Listen to me, Charlie-girl," Phipps whispered as he caught up with her, his voice equal measures of care and concern. He felt faintly blasphemous being friends with someone with the audacity to twist divine scripture to so doubtlessly unholy a plan as whatever Grey was cooking up. "Take care you don't end up more like Haman than Michael,** scheming against an innocent and celebrating far too soon."

"Pssh! Hush up, you old stick in the mud! You're far too serious. Anyway, my intrigues are seamless. No one shall guess my involvement and that bastard Michaelis will, _fall,_ you hear me? FALL! Even if I have to strike him down myself!  You'll see!" And of course she was right: fall he did.

What she didn't foresee was how quickly and easily he would get right back up.

**Author's Note:**

> **Phipps is speaking of Esther ch.7, where the Persian Haman tries to arrange a country-wide slaughter of all Jews—but especially Mordecai, the King's trusted servant—but instead ends up executed himself on the gibbet (gallows) he'd specially built for Mordecai.  
> Grey paraphrased Jesus' words at Luke 10 comparing Sebastian to an already fallen Satan (just how much does she actually know?!) thrown out of Heaven by Michael-the role Grey seems to fancy for herself! 
> 
> A well-educated person of this era would've been well acquainted with the entire Bible and well able to make allusions to such obscure bits of Holy Writ, in confidence they would be understood by all other well educated gentle men and women— even if, like Grey, they weren't particularly God-fearing because it was all a standard part of the required curriculum of the era in the sort of schools Lords and Ladies sent their children to, as was compulsory church attendance on Sundays. 
> 
> +In bespoke (custom) tailoring, individual measurements are so carefully customized to the individual there is even a certain small amount of fullness allowed for the slightly 'asymmetrical form' of what fills a man's trousers. It isn't necessary to ask, as the tailor, pulling, pinning and manipulating the trousers on his customer is close enough to see which side a man habitually 'dresses to' and adjust his customized pattern accordingly. Nina here is just being a cheeky monkey and probably trying to annoy Phipps, whom she's already rudely 'cut,' giving him her back without greeting him.  
> ^ Amelia Bloomer First to promote and design trousers for western European women. to be worn generally. These were not the first trousers to be worn in England by women however. In communities where the only employer was the owner of the local coal mine, whole families, including women and even very young children, went to work in the mines. Mine work had everyone on their hands and knees, both the men tho wielded the pick axes to loosen the coal, and the women,children and animals who did the fetching and carrying. Pit-lasses wore skirts like all good God-fearing christian women did, but were no fools, and hiked their skirts out of the way and added trousers like the men folk wore underneath so that when working, they were neither cutting up their knees nor tripping over the skirts when bending over--and down the mines you were always bent over. Try using a pick or shovel in that position some time.  
> #sap-Americans call it a blackjack. A potentially deadly weapon once habitually carried by police as well as criminals, it consisted of two lead weights, one slightly larger than the other, connected by a stiff spring of about 6" and covered in stitched leather-usually black. Meant to be held in the curled fingers of a fist with the lead ball ends peeking out each side, their purpose was at least dual: it was meant to lend weight to the fist (modern rolls of coins are today sometimes held similarly for the same reasons) and also the lead ends were meant to bend on their springy 'necks' and rush forward when the fist connected with something—like a face, or a jaw, and add weight to the punch, breaking a bone or possibly causing a concussion or unconsciousness. However, if you were a particularly nasty piece of work like Grey, you might hold it more like a microphone, with the small end palmed and the heavier end left to stick out and waggle. This way allowed it to describe a much greater arc before connecting with whatever you're punching. Or you could simply use it like a nightstick, saving your knuckles entirely. Used this way-especially that last way- a sap could bash in a skull better than a hammer strike and kill stone dead in one hit.


End file.
